Can Healthcare Leaders Help Us Reclaim Our Humanity?
This is Part 5 in a 6-part series.
Whatever industry you’re in, if you don’t find a way to tie the core of your business back to the humanity of every individual person you employ or serve, then you and your business are in trouble.
As we navigate the Age of Personalization in healthcare, I invite you to join me and other industry leaders at the Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Virtual Summit on May 3-4. This two-day event will provide insights and strategies for embracing personalization to enhance patient care and improve health outcomes. Register now to secure your spot.
Why?
Part 1 of this series showed that the Cultural Demographic Shift (CDS) is in full force, and how the workforce of the future (and of today) won't stand for forced assimilation anymore. Part 2 explored what it looks like to do the hard work to make inclusion real (and the stakes if we don’t). In Part 3 we looked at how to balance technology and humanity in shaping the future of our organizations. Part 4 addressed what we can learn from healthcare as we rethink major aspects of society.
In this article we continue the exploration of healthcare as an industry in the middle of massive change, and look at how four leaders are working to find the balance between standardization and personalization. It’s tricky, especially in a realm like healthcare – where we want to follow the standards of evidence-based care and efficiency, but at the same time this idea of personalization in delivering that care.
For some insight, I turn to Thomas E. Jackiewicz, who was CEO of Keck Medicine of USC when he shared at the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit last year (and is now the President of University of Chicago Medical Center). In this short video, he talks about how that challenge affects the business of healthcare.
As Jackiewicz said, healthcare at its core is people taking care of people. In this next video, UCSF Health President and CEO Mark Laret addresses the question of how to expand personalization beyond patients to also encompass those taking care of patients – the caregivers.
To be successful in shifting an organizational culture toward these advancements from standardization to personalization, sometimes you need to start with some introspection. Victor Crawford is the CEO of the Pharmaceutical segment at Cardinal Health. Here he talks about their process of going back to their core to ask: Why do we exist? And what does that mean for our future strategy?
For healthcare, personalization of care for a patient isn’t just an abstract idea: it’s a matter of life or death. That’s how Dr. Joseph Alvarnas describes it. He is Vice President of Government Affairs, Senior Medical Director for Employer Strategy, and Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Hematology/Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope. Here he talks about how personalization is changing paradigms of care.
Dr. Alvarnas said of personalization: “It’s a matter of restoration to wholeness.”
He also said that “Cancer care is not a technological experience, it’s a human experience. We don’t treat diseases; we care for patients and their families.”
He is doing what we all need to do, no matter our industry or role: he’s returning us back to our humanity. This is relevant whether you’re treating a patient or whether you’re managing supply chain for a multi-national enterprise, overseeing the curriculum of a higher education institution or creating marketing programs for an innovative new service.
On October 29-30, leaders across healthcare, corporate America and higher education will gather for a virtual summit to discuss inclusion and the collapse of standardization in today’s personalized world – a collapse that has accelerated and been made even more severe by Covid-19 and social unrest.
Learn more at www.ageofpersonalization.com.
